


The sunlight that leaks out of your darkness (and into my world)

by bayloriffic



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-24
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-15 00:03:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bayloriffic/pseuds/bayloriffic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Friday after Scully gets back from Philadelphia, she disappears from the office. <em>Post-Never Again</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	The sunlight that leaks out of your darkness (and into my world)

**Author's Note:**

> Post-ep for “Never Again” and assumes the original timeline where “Never Again” takes place before “Leonard Betts.” Title from [Before Everything is Over](http://theysaid.livejournal.com/1465707.html).

The Friday after Scully gets back from Philadelphia, she disappears from the office. She’s there when Mulder walks down the hall to the bathroom, but when he returns less than five minutes later, the office is empty. 

He has a brief moment of irrational panic—thinking maybe she’s left him for good this time, just walked away without so much as a goodbye—before he notices the little yellow post-it note that’s sitting right in the middle of his desk. 

_Have a good weekend. I’ll see you Monday. –S._

He looks down at the note, then over at the clock above the door. It’s 4:15. 

Scully hasn’t left work early in the four years they’ve been working together and he wonders where she went.

He thinks about calling her, eyeing his cell phone sitting on the corner of the desk. But then he realizes that she’d probably just get annoyed that he can’t leave her alone for more than twenty minutes. Besides, it’s not really any of his business why she left. Maybe she’s got a dentist appointment or dinner with her mother or, hell, a date with another tattooed psychopath. It’s none of his fucking business what she does when she leaves early on Friday nights. 

Not everything is about him, after all. 

So he opens his desk drawer and drops the phone inside, takes a file out of his inbox. 

A little girl in Texas disappeared on her way home from school. There were reports of lights in the sky right around the time she vanished and her parents, both of whom were arrested for dealing meth only a few months before, claim aliens took her. 

He considers flying down there, the eight hour flight, the heat and the dust. He thinks about Roche and dead little girls and tosses the file into the outbox, makes a note to send it over to Violent Crimes. 

 

**

 

Mulder makes it two hours and thirteen minutes before he calls. 

He's spent the last half hour alternately staring at the drawer where his phone is and perfecting his pencil-flipping skills. It’s only when he runs out of pencils that he finally opens the drawer and takes out the phone. 

He flips it open and hits the speed dial for Scully. 

It barely even rings before he snaps the phone closed again. This isn’t a good idea. He’s got no good reason to be calling her and she’s made it pretty clear the last couple of days that she needs some space. 

A few seconds later, he’s putting on his jacket when his phone rings. The light-up display reads Scully and he smiles. 

He waits a few rings before he answers, playing it cool. Not like he was just obsessing about calling her and staring at his phone. When he answers he just says, “Mulder” like he doesn’t know it’s her. 

“Did you need something?” she says without any preamble, her voice tired and flat. 

He just kind of sits there for a few seconds and doesn’t say anything. It’s just, this wasn’t what he was expecting.

“Mulder?” she says, and he can picture her pinching the bridge of her nose, looking exhausted. It seems more and more like she barely has the energy to talk to him these days. “Did you just call?” 

And of course she wasn’t thinking about him because of some deep cosmic connection, but because the damn caller id told her he was thinking about her. He realizes he’s going to need to say something, so he just says, “Yeah. Sorry. That was an accident.” He closes his eyes and hates himself a little. 

“Oh,” she says, and if he didn’t know any better he’d swear he detected a trace of disappointment in her voice. “Okay.” 

She goes silent and he can hear the sounds of traffic in the background and he realizes she’s in her car. Which is weird, since it’s been more than two hours since she left. 

“I was just,” he says, and stops himself because he’s not sure what he was just. He just knows he wanted to talk to her. 

“Mulder?” she says again, and he wonders why every time she says his name these days it sounds like a question. 

“You want to get a drink or something, Scully?” he asks, and even as he says it, he wonders what the hell he’s doing. It sounds a little more desperate than he’d like, but what the hell. It’s not like desperation is new for him. 

She doesn’t respond and he curses himself. Of course she doesn’t want to get a drink with him. She left early to get away from him—why the hell would she want to spend her Friday night with him in some shitty bar when she could be doing whatever it is she does on Friday nights? 

He’s about to apologize, get off the phone before he makes a complete ass out of himself, when she finally responds.

“Okay,” she says, and she still sounds exhausted, but the dullness that’s been there for the last few weeks seems a little lessened. Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking. Either way, he’ll take it. 

He smiles against the phone. “I can be in Annapolis in about an hour if you want to meet somewhere,” he says. 

“No,” she answers, and her voice takes on the guarded tone it has more and more these days. “I’m actually not too far from the office.”

“You’re still in the city?” he asks, a little surprised. He figured she’d have been home for at least an hour by now. “Traffic must really suck.” 

She’s silent for a just a little too long. “Yeah,” she says. “I mean, I had a meeting with Skinner after work, but traffic is pretty terrible.” 

“Oh,” he says because he doesn’t really know how to respond to that and he figures it’s best not to push his luck with her too much right now. “How does O’Brien’s sound for drinks?”

 

**

 

By the time he hangs up the phone he feels exhausted and kind of just wants to go back to his apartment. But as he grabs his coat, he glances down at the desk and sees the note she left him, written in her neat slanted handwriting, and he’s glad he’ll get to see her at least once more before Monday. 

 

**

 

It takes Mulder almost half an hour to get to O’Brien’s—Scully wasn’t kidding about the traffic—and another ten minutes to park. By the time he actually gets inside, Scully’s already there, sitting in a booth near the back, a glass of something clear on the table in front of her. 

She doesn’t see him yet and, for one absurd moment, he considers leaving. Just turning around and walking away, but then she looks up and notices him and her face softens a little, becomes a little less guarded and he knows there’s no way in hell he could leave now.

The bar is packed, filled mostly with suit-clad government types getting an early start on their weekend. 

Mulder fights his way through the crowd and slides into the booth across from her, giving her a half-smile as his knee bumps hers under the table. 

The bruises on her face have started to fade, turning yellow and green, and he wonders if it makes him sick that he notices that it makes her eyes look even bluer than they normally do. 

“So,” he says, going for charming self-deprecation, “you come here often, Agent Scully?” 

That gets him an eyebrow raise, but before she can say anything, their waitress appears beside their table. Mulder orders a beer and when he looks back over at Scully, she’s watching him, chewing on the little plastic stirring straw from her drink. He tries to think of something to say but he can’t seem to stop staring at her mouth. He swallows hard and wonders what the hell they’re doing here. 

The waitress comes back with his beer and he picks the glass up very deliberately, takes drink. 

By the time he sets the glass back down, Scully’s stopped chewing on the straw and he feels at little less weird. She’s got her phone out for some reason, and he wonders if she’s waiting for someone to call. 

She’s still kind of watching him though, so he smiles at her and says, “Did you know a California man’s cell phone repeatedly called his loved ones for hours after his death?” 

“What?” she says and looks at him like she does always does he suggests they hunt down Bigfoot or Mexican goat-suckers, but some of the tension seems to evaporate between them and he can’t help but smile at her. 

“Yeah,” he tells her and takes another drink. “The man died on impact, but in the twelve hours after his death, he made a total of 35 phone calls to his parents, his wife, his brother. And each time they’d answer, they’d get nothing but static.” 

She just shakes her head and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Mulder, that doesn’t even make sense,” she says, with something like her normal skepticism. “It’s more logical to assume the impact of the crash caused his phone to become lodged against something. It’s likely that the call button was depressed by some object around him and the calls were made in that way.”

“But he called several different people, sometimes hours apart, Scully. If a button had been stuck, all the calls would have gone to the same person, and they wouldn’t have stopped for hours at a time.”

“So what are you suggesting, Mulder? That this man was making calls beyond the grave?” She rolls her eyes and makes a little sound he thinks might be a laugh. Their knees are still touching under the table, and he’s really glad he came here tonight.

 

**

 

A few hours later, they walk outside together. Scully's walking close enough to him that her arm keeps brushing against his, and Mulder concentrates on matching his pace to hers, extending the contact a little bit longer. 

“Do you want me to take you home?” he asks, because he thinks she might be a little drunk, even though she only had two drinks. She just seems so much smaller these days than she used to, like there’s barely anything to her. 

She just laughs, a real laugh this time, and shakes her head. He gives her a half-smile in return, a little confused about what’s so funny. It feels like these days she’s turning into someone he doesn’t recognize, and he doesn’t understand why.

“I’m fine, Mulder,” she says. Of course she is. She's always fucking fine. A couple of vodka tonics, a few punches from a guy in Philadelphia. She never needs any help. 

He waits while she opens her car door, and before she gets in she stands on her tiptoes and kisses him gently, right on the side of his mouth. She was probably going for his cheek, but she’s so short and he’s so tall and, well. He’s not complaining. 

Her hair smells a little like smoke and her lips are cool and dry against his and this ridiculous little gesture is going to mess with his head for months, he knows. 

“Scully,” he says, because he’s not sure what else to say. 

She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Goodnight, Mulder,” she says, her voice low and quiet. She doesn’t look at him as she slides behind the wheel and closes the car door.

Mulder watches as she drives away and raises his hand as she pulls out of the lot. She doesn’t wave back, but he keeps his arm up until her car fades from view, just in case she looks back.

****** 

 

end


End file.
